Down under the water she heard a voice speak and the voice said:
* * *
I wonder who’s going to tell the story, Meg? Nothing else to say. You see, you had to be here and you weren’t. You know the one that goes: How many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a lightbulb? How many? You fucking don’t know because you weren’t there, man! You weren’t fucking there! The texture of history; the rubbery material it’s made out of — say, latex. No. Something stronger than latex that can stretch out to a pure translucence until it’s nothing but a molecule thick, man, not even that. You had to be high to be there. Listen up, man, let me tell you, they can’t reproduce the shit I went through; Tripizoid or no Tripizoid, it isn’t going to work for me. No confusion (some guy said, raising his fingers up in the V sign). Don’t give me that Walter Cronkite that’s-the-way-it-is bullshit, man; I don’t care who’s directing the reenactment chamber, I’m gonna out-Hector Hector, man, and there ain’t nothing to be said. I won’t go on, I won’t go on with it. They’re going to have to drag me in to Vetdock. They’ll have to shove the Tripizoid down my throat. There is the buzz in the ear; the buzz in the ear’s as close as you’ll get. That’s what this friend tells me, likes to say that, as if it means something. Just can’t get it right, what a friend says to me. Piece it together, dude, put two and two next to each other and figure this … shit … out. Elephant grass. Man, journalists always mention the elephant grass. And rice paddies — and the Mekong Delta — always the rich beauty of the mountains and the Mekong Delta, man; always that to set up the contrast; and jungle rot, always that rot, man, along with slogging through this and slogging through that; always point man this and point man that and ambush this and ambush that: look close, you noticed the line; the line is late 1967, when the crewcuts grew out and the love beads grew down and the shirts were unbuttoned wide and the refusal of orders became routine and the air mattresses began to sag. Back home the line was pot and acid to speed and meth and coke. You had to be there. You weren’t there. You should’ve been there. Should’ve been you. Reporters put fear in your eyes. Put fear in your mouth. The grimace. Reporters tell the story: take the hill, lose the hill. Take a hill. Lose a hill. Story has to rotate on an axis, has to spin around the Polaris of fear; story has to make some kind of sense, dissasembled and reassembled: all ticker-tape bullshit and journalese code wired back. The steel cases for the film reels arriving in New York days late: old news is better than no news — so by the time it gets on the tube we’re long gone from that shit, man, and the dead have been hoisted up, the net sagging, the chopper struggling to get the heave-ho going, pressing the grass down in the wash, and the men left behind waddle back into the bush; then the chopper does that little dip to one side and swings herself skyward under a barrage of flack — always flack — while the door gunner sprays wildly, his haphazard aim still tuned to water buffalo, and then that profound silence when the dust-off — always the dust-off — has gone out of range, not even the murmur of it anymore, and there’s just the silence of foliage and rice, man, that nobody — no writer, no miked-up Morley Safer — has ever caught, bottled up, and taken back to the States: the world, always
the world, as if we really called it that and maybe we did but not to you, motherfucker; always the helmet graffiti quote, the totems and good luck charms reductio ad absurdum with their meaning couched, that said: these suckers will be offed, retroactively lending those charms the meaning you want; the terrible gist you already got in your living room easy chairs watching Uncle Walter while the vertical barely holds and the image threatens to turn itself into what it is, just so many radio waves coming off a tower for your viewing pleasure; the stately eye of the network, or the peacock tail metamorphosing into color plumage — another line; black and white/color: the browns and greens of the marijuana going to bright blue pills and tabs with psychedelic decoration — the fine bubbling fix gnarly and many-hued; don’t go there, man, don’t even try to get the combat in: never seen it work, man; only good story is a dead story … all that free-formed fear becoming nullified at the brain tip, with dark pure dark, so you sit inside your head for that split second and say: shit, ain’t no heaven or nothing but just this terminal darkness while some guy says, far off, in a trickle of audible sound itching the last viable neurons — gonna be all right, Hank, gonna be just fine. Fuck Asklepios, fuck that nonsense: Where was he when we needed him? Just one more bleeder falling into the nonsense of his pain, the gung-ho posture dissipating while he holds his chin up, prone on the stretcher, with the plastic cigar tip in his mouth and says he’s going to get the gook that sent the bullet, going to get him — while the camera, immoral and unjust, moves down to the shredded legs. He holds himself off from the pure shot and stays steady in the endorphin high and keeps the pose as long as he can until the morphine drip shoves the endorphins aside so that the pain can come in and you see it in his face, which goes from square-jawed, à la George Patton, Jr., to a prune of pain just before the film is cut and the story terminated: he was the biggest and the bravest motherfucker until he stepped on our own claymore out there, along the line, and then — always along the line, always out there — the faint distant explosion, the small cloud, the camera drawing itself along the tree line, and then (cut in) the medic hustling himself to work, elevating. (There’s this place, someone tells me, called the Gleel; some nice little glen down in a grove of trees with the babbling brook and the moss and the microclimate of coolness; place of curative powers, the guy tells me, and then he goes on to explain, getting professorial — in that way of the ex-junkie — that it’s where Saint Dymphna exercises her singular healing powers, and I tell him, Fuck off, and then go to it in my mind and imagine myself there.) Never used the word Bedlam; never heard the word once. This is Morley Safer, reporting from outside Hue, in the hamlet that can only be called Bedlam, South Vietnam. No tell of the grunt Hogarth — that silly little fuck, skinny as a whip, from Ellison, South Dakota, riding point — yeah, point — that afternoon (always through the head); and after the day was done, after the men took Hill #21, the cost was a high one, five dead, ten wounded. This is Morley Safer, somewhere — Christ knows where, exactly — outside Hue, in Vietnam. Hovercrafts: giant bulldozers to clear the jungle, carving the symbol for the Engineer Battalions into the countryside; sensors that can sniff out the smell of piss ammonia and campfire smoke from a thousand feet up; all kinds of shit to compose the nightly newscast and usually cast into the bright shiny emotion of battle: bric-a-brac, man, was the main thing — a thousand hours of footage filled with that shit — preset images: men with their boots off trying to cool their feet — the skin moon-white and swollen; men lying back smoking kif; boys fingering their love beads — bearded, long-haired (because, man, we knew that the fact that we knew what was up back home was a big kick to the viewing audience and milked the irony and turned it into itself, man, all pose and acting; man, you gotta think: the whole enfolding gig came out of that, the double duplicity of it, actors on the big jungle stage mugging for the lens, even the Hanoi Hilton guys doing their Christmas card home, slump shouldered, singing their hearts out, amazingly in harmony, a barbershop quartet of vocal entwining; hanging bulbs on the tree — the whole thing, staged and restaged and then staged again until the final product had the humility of fine acting, souls embodying characters who, in turn, embodied the words: Say it, man, you bent-back double-elbowed motherfucker — that one guy bowing down too far — early footage, one of the first POW films, making a big show of it, all secret signals to the outside world, lips a bit too high around the edges in the smile department, frowns deeper than normal, fingers crabbing signals. Even the secret gestures were part of the show, man; and later when I got home and tried to really get home there was that, too, in the way I hung the streets of town in the jacket: don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it was a farce, I’m just saying we came back to the bit roles and took the parts that were available partly because our reentry was quick — into the great cargo transports and then, bingo, home sweet home (guys enacted the routine: fell before native soil and kissed the tarmac. Did I? I most certainly did. The grit and dust of Detroit Metro never tasted so good, as sweet as Tang). But the flight went from Saigon to Germany to home in the flick of the Zippo: all brilliant American sky beneath which the pompous Army band played their Sousa (which reminds me: look up the old footage of Air Cav. Band playing their brains out for CBS while the jets drop load after load on the Vietcong for the sake of villager morale). No long rearrangement of reality à la the